It's hard to know what to tell young children about the biggest news
story of our time, the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Four-year-olds are curious by
nature, to say the least. They're such indiscriminate information
sponges that it can be darned difficult keeping big news of the "real
world" out of their intake zone, even if you try.

Heaven knows must of us are careful not to sit them down in front of the
evening news and go off to make dinner. But they still manage to catch
wind of some of the more super-sized news stories of our day & age.

When that happens, it feels to this parent like the safest thing to do
is offer some factual context, and some reassurance - enough information
to create a basic understanding of what's happening, without
nightmare-inducing levels of detail. Then let them question, comment,
vent a little as needed, treating them like the little emerging citizens
of the world that they are, complete with free speech rights (within
reason, that is!).

That's what I ended up doing with my four-year-old this past weekend.
She has been peripherally aware of the Gulf oil spill, especially living
right near the coast in Florida. But we've shielded her from the more
ugly aspects and images of the story, the way we do from any genuinely
disturbing, scary input from this information overloaded world.

Early Saturday morning my daughter heard me talking on the phone about
the Hands
Across The Sand event, a fifteen-minute global happening
where men, women and children would be gathering on coastal beaches
worldwide, joining hands in peaceful opposition to the threat of
continued offshore drilling.

When I got off the phone, Aliza was full of questions. So I carefully
filled her in on what offshore oil drilling was, how BP's rig had
exploded and sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, how oil had been gushing out
ever since and how much trouble that was causing. I reassured her that
it would get fixed, but I couldn't promise her it would never happen
again.

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That's where activism came into play.

Aliza was disturbed and dismayed when she heard about the oil spill and
what it was doing to waters, wildlife and coastlines. She wanted to know
if other kids knew about all this. And she wanted to know what she
could do about it.

The thing of it is, once she felt like she had a better handle on this
oil spill disaster story that been confusing her for a while, once she
felt like she was able to have her say about it, and once she felt like
she had done something to help prevent it from happening again...she
seemed to feel much, much better.

Maybe The Next Generation Can Get Us Off Oil Once & For All...

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http://www.youtube.com/user/dptilson

Daniel Tilson was born and raised in New York City, a
graduate of Stuyvesant High School, and New York University's Film and Television School, with a double major in Film/TV Production & Broadcast Journalism.
Tilson established his own first (more...)